Deserialization of self-referencing properties does not work

Question

I have this object with a Parent property that reference another object of the same type:

[JsonObject(IsReference = true)]
class Group
{
    public strin         


        

Answer 1

Using references doesn't work with objects that only have constructors with parameters.

Json.NET has to deserialize all the child values before it creates the parent, it needs those values to pass to the constructor, so there is no valid parent reference to assign to the child.